GameCentral speaks to the creator of the new Wolfenstein about interactive storytelling, and everything from The Last Of Us to Bayonetta.

In recent years the PC has regained much of its former influence over the video games industry as a whole, but many of the older titles associated with its first golden age still languish in disuse. It’s still unclear what id Software hopes to do with Doom but the latest attempt to revitalise the Wolfenstein franchise is by far the most interesting there’s ever been.

The New Order is the work of Swedish studio MachineGames, the founders of which worked on The Chronicles Of Riddick and The Darkness at Starbreeze Studios. When playing the game you can immediately see that it follows in the same style, with solid first person action punctuated by effective storyline that manages to pack an emotional punch no matter how absurd the subject matter.

As we point out in our interview with creative director Jens Matthies this has become almost the developer’s signature skill, with the early section of the game we played veering wildly from B-movie schlock to body horror to historical war drama. A mixture that would never even be considered by other developers, let alone handled with such effortless mastery as it is here.

The game itself is due to be released in a couple of weeks, and once again tells the story of one-man army William “B.J.” Blazkowicz. Except this time he fails at the beginning of the story and the majority of the game is spent in an alternate history version of the 1960s, where the Nazis won the Second World War and spread their hate across the entire planet.

You can read more from our first hands-on with the game here, where it became obvious that it isn’t just the storytelling which marks out The New Order as special but its rejection of much of what has become the norm for modern first person shooters. There’s no recharging health or trivially easy combat in this game. And yet it isn’t a simple retro throwback either, but instead an experience that tries to use the best of both new and old techniques. And one we can’t wait to play in its entirety…

Warning: The interview below contains spoilers about the finale of The Last Of Us, it’s towards the end and clearly marked but do be careful.

GC: I’ve enjoyed the game each time I’ve played it now but that demo in particular, playing the story right from the start… tonally it’s just all over the place. It’s kind of campy one minute, like a straight action game the next, and then seguing into a serious story about Nazi atrocities. It works but I can’t believe it does. How did you come up with a such a peculiar mix?

JM: It started because I think fundamentally a first person game is unrealistic, most video games are really. In a first person shooter you’re one guy, you’re taking out these armies of people and you get shot and you heal up in seconds. And seeing as that is the case I looked at things that also have that insane over-the-top stuff, and humour, and yet also feels really authentic and dramatic.

So things like Tarantino movies, Django Unchained is a good example. When Django shoots somebody it sprays blood all over the room and some things are super funny and then other things are just really dramatic, like when they pull his wife out of the hole in the ground or the guy gets tortured. And another good example is a movie like District 9, which is also… have you seen it?

GC: Yeah.

JM: So it’s this goofy guy and the whole first 20 minutes is just comedy, right? They’re burning some shack with eggs in it and they’re popping and he’s joking about it, and then it turns into this really over-the-top action but it’s dramatic too. You start to feel for these characters and the fate that befalls them. So that’s very much the vibe that we’re going for, it is all of those things and I see it more as a wider spectrum than maybe most movies or whatever but it’s a kind of ride I think is really interesting and cool.

GC: The game made me think of The Darkness in particular, which was a great game but based on a pretty awful IP.

JM: [laughs]

GC: It’s almost like you specialise in making really great games out of terrible ideas.

JM: [laughs very loudly] I think there’s certainly some truth to that historically, but I don’t think it’s the case this time around. Growing up as a kid of course I played games, and I got so fascinated by this thing that you could, from your imagination – from pure thought – you could create a world and you could go into that world. And I was obsessed with this and I thought the best version of this would be if you could actually see the world from your own eyes and walk around… But thinking about it I just couldn’t see how that problem could be solved. Because back then it was just side-scrollers and how do you go from that to a world that you see from your own eyes?

And then Wolfenstein 3D comes out and it’s like [mimes head exploding] because they’ve solved this problem and it’s so awesome. A lot of people on the development team had a very similar experience and so this whole franchise is very dear to us.

GC: Personally I really enjoy the idea of taking an absurd thing seriously, whether it’s games or movies or anything else. Not gritty serious, but serious in the context of it own universe.

JM: I love that too.

GC: With comic books and so on I’m always much more interested in seeing the more obscure and obviously silly characters interact with the well-known ones. I sense that’s something you might appreciate too?

JM: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Batman is a really good example and what Frank Miller did with The Dark Knight Returns, compared to what Batman was before that…

GC: And yet I can’t bear the Nolan movies because they’ve just gone too far, they’ve taken all the fun out of it. There’s a sweet spot between seriousness and silliness.

GC: You obviously have very fond memories of Wolfenstein 3D but I think of it almost like a blank slate, because there’s nothing about it that’s distinctive nowadays. Apart from the Nazi-themed setting, which is only relatively unusual, there’s nothing there to take from it. That’s not a criticism in any way but when it came out it was all about getting the tech working – there was no opportunity for any greater nuance.

JM: Yeah, and you were so limited back then in terms of what was possible with a video game. But that also meant you had to project a lot into it. But regardless of that it’s true, the amount you have to work with from Wolfenstein 3D is not vast. But the things that are there are really interesting, so our characterisation of B.J. Blazkowicz, for example, is based on that image you had of him at the bottom of the screen.

And that head made him look like a square-jawed American army grunt, one inspired by the action heroes of the late ’80s and early ’90s. And taking a character like that and making him human and interesting and putting him in conflicts where he’s out of his element, and where he has to interact with people in other ways than just shooting them in the head [laughs], that’s really interesting to me. I love taking things and making them real.

GC: I think most of the previous games made him mute, so essentially he was just you. But in the opening sequence he’s clearly not just a lantern-jawed hero, he was obviously affected by what was going on – which is very unusual for a video games character.

Wolfenstein: The New Order – old school enemy

JM: What I think is so fascinating about games is, and what we always try to do is align the player with the protagonist. And there are a lot of games that don’t really understand that is important, and it’s a hard thing to do, but there’s a very key difference if you compare it to a movie. Because in a movie you have something which I call an emotional proxy. Because the protagonist in a movie you don’t always have to relate to what a person’s feeling, because that person is feeling it for you and you can see that and you can understand that. And that person can propel the events of the movie on their own, and you’re along for the ride and you’re watching it.

But in a game YOU are propelling the action, so that means it’s not enough to just… you can’t dissociate the player from the protagonist. They have to feel the same thing about the same things, so when we introduce Deathshead [the long-running nemesis from previous Wolfenstein games] for example, it’s important that the player feels what’s happening. B.J. feels it too but ideally what you want to do is align those two so that you have the same experience, and that way things make sense. There’s a lot of games where you may not even like your protagonist because they’re not behaving in a way…

GC: Well, that’s 90 per cent of all games really.

JM: [laughs] Exactly! Because they’re not behaving in a way that you would behave.

GC: And it gets to the point where it actually puts me off playing the game. Kratos from God Of War is the obvious example but even someone like Delsin from inFamous: Second Son… I’m just not interested in pretending to be that character.

JM: [laughs]

GC: But particularly with Kratos I want to play that game, get him killed at the first opportunity, and that’s it. That’s the end of his story.

JM: [laughs] And I’ve had that experience myself, and that is a movie thing. We can do it in movies but it creates real problems in games.

GC: And yet the irony is that in general movie protagonists are much more likely to be characters that you like and empathise with then games despite, as you point out, it making more sense for it to be the other way round.

JM: You know, there’s a type of character I like to call the ‘loveable a**hole’. And a good example of an introduction of that sort of character was Tommy Lee Jones’ character in The Fugitive. And there’s a huge amount of those now, like House is one of those…

JM: I agree, he’s not a full on psychopath but he’s a pretty unpleasant guy. He’s not someone you’d like to hang around with. But for a character that’s not you that’s fine, like Jackie in The Darkness is a clear psychopath. But you have to construct it in a way that you can relate to what they’re feeling, as a player. You have to track their emotional state across the journey and that’s a hard thing to do, but it’s well worth pursuing.

GC: The other thing that struck me about the beginning of the game is that after the intro was over it had really got me pumped to kill some Nazis. As you imply, as long as the emotion is genuine it doesn’t really matter how silly the plot points are. You can have whatever you want in the game, cyborg monsters or whatever, as long as the characters react to them in a realistic way.

JM: As long as it’s grounded in something you feel for, that’s the key thing.

GC: But where do you draw the line? In the bit where you see the medical experiments and the burners start up you can’t help but think of real Nazi atrocities, which really doesn’t seem the sort of topic for an action video game. Do you refer to the Final Solution, because presumably if they won then….

JM: How we look at it is this is a fantasy, obviously. But we didn’t want to do Nazis that are only cartoons, that are only…. There’s this assumption that you’re only supposed to feel, ‘Why are Nazis evil? Just because they’re called the Nazis!’ So if they’re prancing around in a leather uniform and they wear a swastika then they’re bad, but why are they bad? And we really wanted to explore that and make sure that the player understood why.

And of course it’s happening on a larger than life canvas but it’s rooted in what their philosophies were. And we explore that through the whole game. And that’s also one reason why for example they speak German in the international version, because there’s a level of authenticity there… like you can’t get it if it’s an English speaker with a German accent. It’s not the same thing.

GC: But do you actually mention the Holocaust?

JM: When you play the full game you will be put in some intense situations. I don’t really want to…

GC: Oh, you’re trying to avoid spoilers. Sorry, I wasn’t sure whether you were just avoiding the question or not!

GC: So in terms of gameplay there are obviously a lot of very old school elements to The New Order. The collectable ammo and health kits and so on. But how do you distinguish between the old ideas that were rightly abandoned and the ones that still work? There’s something we games journos like to do at a big reveal event which is video game bingo, where you watch for every time there’s an on-the-rail sections with a minigun, or a helicopter crash, or a slow motion bit where you break in a door…

JM: [laughs]

GC: Are you purposefully trying to keep away from all that? Because I did notice a turret sequence quite early on… and things like that are almost as old as Wolfenstein 3D.

JM: We don’t necessarily look at it that way, it’s not like we look at other games and think, ‘Woah! There’s been a lot of that’. We think about what is right for this moment. And we love the sense of variation, so of the three levels that have been shown publicly up to now they’re quite drastically different, in terms of atmosphere and mood – and we also introduce a lot of different gameplay elements.

We have different vehicles you get to use, or you’re walking up a wall in the opening… so for us if we have a turret sequence that’s part of a very wide spectrum of variation. And like normal shooting your gun that stuff can be really fun, it’s all in the execution. And I think there are other conventions like… I played the The Last Of Us which I really liked, I think that’s a fantastic game, but they have a lot of conventions in that game.

GC: It’s true. Even the characters are just tropes really.

JM: You can play bingo there too! ‘Now I’m going to open this garage door and it’s going to lead into a cut scene…

GC: Or there’ll be a bit in the dark with zombies for about an hour and then it’ll switch to bandits out in the open, and the whole game follows that pattern of encounters.

JM: Sure, and you can say the exact same thing about every movie that has not been written by Charlie Kaufman, you know? Act I: you introduce them, here’s the problem. Act II: now this happens and they have to make a choice… There is a structure there but it’s a foundation you can build upon. And you can build an awesome building or you can build a shack. And for us we’re trying to build an epic experience and it goes to some pretty extreme places. So whether or not we have a turret or… you’re armed with a knife – that’s also very standard but it serves a really good purpose because very few things are as satisfying as stabbing Nazis in the throat! [laughs]

GC: It’s true, that doesn’t get old… I don’t know how long I’ve got here so I’ll just carry on.

JM: That’s fine, I can tell you’re a good guy, I mean a good journalist.

GC: I don’t know about that. My spelling’s awful for a start.

JM: [laughs] This has been a good conversation, I’m happy to continue.

GC: Thank you. Oh god, now I’ve forgotten what I was going to ask you next.

JM: I’ve freaked you out haven’t I?

GC: That’s what I get for being a bad journalist and not writing my questions down. [Starts punching own head] Oh wait, I remember: quiet moments. I loved the bit in The Darkness where you just sit down and watch TV with your girlfriend and it’s completely up to you how long you do it for. Was that you?

JM: Uh-huh. Thank you.

GC: I don’t know if there’s an exact equivalent to that in The New Order but there certainly seem to be extended sequences with no combat, such as the bit with the playing cards you showed at E3. But do you have the hub worlds of your previous two games as well? It must be particularly hard to add in these non-action elements to a game like Wolfenstein. How do you weight up when and when not to do it?

JM: So much of that is just gut feeling. We have a creative collective at home where we all sort of have different passions. I’m obviously very passionate about the storytelling part, while other people are equally passionate about other aspects of the game. So we sit down together but we never think about it in terms of ‘We’ve gotta have a certain amount of this, or we gotta have a certain amount of this’. There’s never any ratios or pie charts or anything like that. We sit down and we say, ‘Here’s what I think would be cool’. And then someone else says, ‘Oh yeah, and if we did that then wouldn’t this be cool?’ And then we start building it.

And then someone says, ‘Well, I think this is going to take too long. If we’re in this zone for too long, in this mode of playing or whatever, we need some breathing room’. Or, ‘Now we’re breathing too long, we need to get back to the action’. And so we develop the pacing as a group until we feel we’ve got things right. And so we don’t look at it like, ‘In this game we gotta have three hubs!’ It’s, ‘This is what the game is, this is the journey you’re on as a player’.
And so in this game we have some areas that are a little hub-like, like you can walk around, talk to other people, do more adventuring type stuff, but it’s not a place from which you go do something, go back, go do something else, and then come back again. So it’s part of the flow of the whole piece.

And I think… somebody told me about how Nirvana made their music. About how they had this loud-quiet mentality, so one verse was quiet, loud chorus, quiet verse… and that’s what it’s about, it’s about building that pacing and dramatic flow so you have climaxes to reach and then you come down and you can build again. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.

GC: So you’re the creative director, but it sounds like you wrote the story as well?

JM: Yeah, we have another guy called Tommy [Tordsson Björk] who wrote some part of it but it’s mostly me and some of the other guys.

Wolfenstein: The New Order – it does have turrets

GC: OK. So how do you start a project like this? You come in day one of making The New Order but what do you actually begin with? Is it a storyboard? If you’re going by your gut that’s a difficult thing to plan for.

JM: I have a method for getting to interesting story concepts. So I explore that a little bit and then I’ll usually write three treatments, so that’s how it starts. I developed three ideas, I wrote one page treatments for each and I submitted them to the group and we all talked about it. And I submit things that I really, really love, right? So no matter which one it is I love them all. [laughs] And so we decided on, ‘OK, so this is the one that we’re doing’. And then I took some of the best parts from the other ones and put them into this one. So that’s how it starts.

And then another thing is locations. Because that’s a huge part of it. Because the story treatment is just, ‘Here’s how it starts, here’s the middle, here’s the end’. But in between all that you go places, and it’s very much structured as this… it’s an action adventure much more than it is a straight-up shooter. Even though it has a lot of shooting in it. So you wanna go on and adventure and you want to go to really interesting places. But the mistake we made in The Darkness was a lot of the locations came out of what would be reasonable for the story. So we were developing the story and we thought, ‘Well, okay so now this is gonna happen. What’s a good place for that to happen in? OK, it’s this place’.

And what that led to is that the environments weren’t as interesting as they could be, conceptually. And so we refused to do that again. This time around we said, ‘What are really interesting locations?’ So bear in mind we have the story treatment, we know roughly what it’s about and where it’s going, but then we just list what are the most awesome locations we can think of. And then I look at that list and I think, ‘How do I take this story and make it work with these locations? That’s going to be impossible!’ But then I started thinking about it and it just became really cool.

Because it means you have to do really interesting things to the plot to get from this place to this place, so it made the story much better by using that approach. And then it’s all back and forth collectively, and so what we do as a group is we develop what we call a walkthrough for each level. And that is basically the flow of the level and it can contain all kinds of materials like maps, or references, whatever it is it all goes into the walkthrough.

GC: OK, so it’s like a document, not a playable thing?

JM: Yeah, it’s like a document. A very, very complicated document. [laughs] And those take a huge amount of time to make, especially because we all have our passions and we need to negotiate with each other. And often I’ll have something I’m really passionate about and somebody else may have something they’re really passionate about and the two are mutually incompatible. So then we have to talk about that and find a way around it, and often that leads to a third place that’s better for both of us. And so a lot of things are just… so for example in the opening you’ve played they roll you in in the wheelchair and the Nazi comes in and my gut feeling is that this is much stronger from the first person perspective, because you’ll feel really trapped.

GC: Definitely, especially as you just want to get out there and smash that Nazi’s face.

JM: Exactly, and so you feel very vulnerable and hopeless. So that is a typical example of a gut-feeling call. Because that could also be a cinematic. But at the end of the day that’s how you have to start and you just have to talk to people who you really trust and who are really passionate and you build from there.

[A worried looking PR person appears at the door, looking worried.]

GC: I think my time’s probably up by the looks of it. But just quickly: are we going to get proper swastikas in the UK version?

JM: Yes.

GC: Because that always annoys me when we just get the German version forced on us with all the censorship. And then the other thing is can you confirm whether the phrase ‘Mein leben’ [it means ‘my life’ – GC] is in the game? Because I always remember the soldiers saying that when they died in the original game, and I still say it to this day when something goes wrong.

JM: [laughs] Do you really want me to confirm this?

GC: If they don’t say it at some point the game’s getting 0/10.

JM: [laughs] Let me just ask you, if you get the game in your hands and you start playing it from the beginning and you don’t know the answer to that question…

GC: [laughs] OK, I get you.

JM: [laughs] We’re very conscious of the legacy and we love those kinds of things… so cool things will be in the game.

[looks for PR guy]

GC: Well look, there’s no one there. Do you mind if we just carry on?

JM: No, no. I’m good, this is the best conversation I’ve had all day. Keep going. [laughs]

GC: One of my favourite subjects is how impossible it is to translate movie action sequences to games. The truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark is my usual example, or the car chase at the end of Mad Max 2. Classic sequences but ones that are almost impossible for a video game to copy, especially in first person. I always hate the term cinematic. That’s so degrading to games, it should be gamematic.

JM: Yeah. [laughs]

GC: The idea that the highest praise you can bestow on a game is to say that it’s just like a movie is offensive to me. I want games to do the things that games do best, not be held back by trying to mimic some completely unrelated medium.

JM: [laughs] I have a good story that for me is the difference between a movie and a video game. One time I went to the Guggenheim in New York and there’s like a central atrium or whatever and there’s like a spiral… it’s not a staircase but from that all the rooms come. And in those rooms are many, many of the classic masters: Degas, Picasso… it’s like the cultural history of the Western world. You go there and you see some amazing artwork, and it makes you feel something.

And I was looking for a long time and I stepped out into the atrium, I was pretty high up, and for some reason I looked down and it was like 20 metres down to the concrete. And I had this insane sense of vertigo where really the fear of death comes upon you. You know? [laughs] And I thought that emotion is so incredibly stronger than any of the emotions I’ve had while viewing any of this artwork, it’s so much more powerful.

And that’s what a game can do. It can give you that sense of vertigo. I still remember to this day in Half-Life, when I was climbing a ladder and I looked down and I had this huge sense of vertigo. And movies cannot do that.

GC: That’s interesting, because that’s a very primal, very simplistic emotion. But the emotions you get from traditional art – whether the paintings you saw or a music piece like Moonlight Sonata – you experience them and it’s really complex and it’s inspiring all these connected thoughts and memories. You hear a song and you’ll think of being in love, will you ever play a game and think that?

JM: Yes, I think so. I can completely identify with that example of music, although in my case it’s probably not a classical piece [laughs]. But it stirs things in me but I think it’s more about… I’m really not pretentious about these things. Like if you feel something and you really feel it, for me it’s not necessarily… like love you could call it a higher emotion but it’s also very, very primal. And it’s the intensity of that, it’s the intensity that I’m after.

GC: When you’re scared of heights though, that’s a single response that doesn’t vary. When you fall in love it’s not like Hollywood pretends, it’s not a switch that suddenly turns on it’s something that slowly builds up and changes over time.

JM: I think whatever art can evoke, video games can evoke. And I think video games have much more potential to evoke them, because they can put you there in the way that other things can’t. But you’re dealing with different types of rhythms. Like if it’s a TV series it’s hugely different from a movie in terms of how it evolves. It didn’t use to be like that because in the old days TV was the second rate entertainment but now you can by a season, you can sit down and watch a whole season back-to-back and you get close to characters in a way you would never be able to in a movie. Or you could, but at the expense of everything else.

Games I think have the best of all worlds: because you’re there, it’s happening to you, you’re affecting things, and they’re often quite lengthy too – so you have a lot of time to build characters. On the other hand what’s tricky about games, especially first person games, is that you’re operating at insane-o-speed. Moving around this room in real life even if I run it will take me at least a second and a half to get to the door. And in a video game it’s 0.2 seconds! And that affects everything. So if you have a game that’s really fast-paced in terms of the gameplay, which our game is, and then you go into a quieter moment and maybe you want to tell something you still have to do it really rapidly. And it doesn’t feel like it while you’re playing.

[At this point the PR guy reappears, with the same look of concern on his face.]

JM: So, err… pacing. And that’s where a lot of games lose people, when they tell their story they’re doing it at a different pace than what their gameplay is at. So you’re running around, you’re doing these things and then it’s like hitting a wall. And it’s a slog through through the story stuff and then you’re back into the game. And your natural inclination is to just pressing skip and ignore those bits. And that’s a really important thing to think about because as we do performance capture for example, we have obscene amounts of performance capture in this game, we work a lot with the speed at which people talk, so we approach the whole thing like it’s Aaron Sorkin-esque, you know? Where everybody’s talking like this [clicks fingers in quick succession].

GC: And yet most games are so slow, you’re sitting there shouting, ‘Get on with it! Get on with your intense emotional journey!’

JM: [laughs] But yes, I think it has way more potential, but it’s also… it’s a medium that never gets to rest. Or it never has. But I think The Last Of Us is a good example, that’s an experience that happens when things have stabilised. The same thing happened with movies. The early movies were just shock and awe, ‘Look at me spin the camera!’

GC: Well, they’re getting back to that.

Wolfenstein 3D – the first first person shooter (more or less)

JM: [laughs] But once the medium stabilised that’s when you started to see really good proper movies. And The Last Of Us may be the first example of that that we have, in that it is really establishing everything – these are the mechanics, which have been established in much earlier games – and using that as their sort of field to grow something.

*** WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE LAST OF US’S ENDING ***

GC: For me The Last Of Us only truly worked because of the ending. Too much of it is cliché and predictable up until then, but the ending was ambiguous and kind of meaningless in its impact on the game world. It was really about the characters and about what their actions said about the human condition and the selfishness of emotions.

JM: For me I see what you saying, but for me it was the opposite reaction. For me it was the one moment in the game where they didn’t align my motivations with the character’s motivation. It forced you to do this thing.

GC: It did yes, you’re right.

JM: And as you went into the room with the doctors and you kind of had to kill those guys to free her.

GC: Could you have left them? I did kill the first one but not the others.

JM: Yeah, the first one you had to kill and that seems to me it’s a step beyond because you can sort of relate to ‘Get her at all costs’. But when that thing happens let’s reduce the hope for humanity arbitrarily…

GC: But that was the point, that she meant so much to him that he literally didn’t care about anyone else. He would rather let the world burn…

JM: Yes, I agree. But the larger point here is that you and I can sit here and have this conversation and that’s what that game does. It permits this thing. And this is the thing that movies have had for decades.

Jens Matthies – he likes The Last Of Us

GC: So if you had made that game would you have had two endings? Would you have allowed a choice? Or would you just not have got yourself into that situation?

JM: I think that’s a very powerful idea and who knows, that may be the only way you can execute that idea. But I would certainly like to sit down and think about it, whether or not you could. For me it’s not about whether those things should happen, it’s just that I’m not there emotionally as a player. I’m not emotionally ready to be able to do it. The guy on the screen wants something different from what I want. So something would have to happen to make me want to do the same thing.

GC: I guess that was kind of the point though. That you knew it was wrong but you also understood why the character was doing it. So it’s kind of using the fact that you’re not the character to make its point.

JM: But it’s all about if you can’t align the player to want to do the same thing then you should probably do something else, or refocus on finding ways to get the player into the same mindset.

GC: Do you think the problem there was that they had a clever ending that they wanted to be in it no matter what? Although… didn’t they change the ending actually?

JM: Is that something you know from speaking to them?

GC: They revealed it a while back. I think the original ending was more straightforward where most of the hospital sequence was a cut scene and the final scene was a bit more optimistic about the fate of the world. So maybe they were originally building up to an ending that was more aligned, as you’d say, and then changed it at the last minute.

JM: I think conceptually it’s really strong, it’s just in the execution. Because up to that point I could feel the same thing all the way through. But anyway, there’s no project you can’t find flaws with. It’s like that with everything. But even though I think the kid uses the word f*** a little bit too much…

GC: She did but I kind of appreciate the fact that I didn’t really like either character. If Ellie was real I’d be shouting at her to get off my lawn. You were obviously meant to like her, but I didn’t really.

JM: [laughs] I liked them both, it was extremely well written.

GC: Oh it was very well written. They were just written as people I wouldn’t like.

JM: [laughs] The point when you meet the guy who had the engine and he leads you somewhere and the zombies are behind a gate. And you say to him, ‘Is that gate gonna hold ’em?’ And he says, ‘Well I locked it, and they don’t have a key’. [laughs] But that’s the broader point for me about that game, that it’s the kind of experience about which you can have this conversation.

*** WARNING: END OF SPOILERS ***

GC: The other thing that annoys me about movie-influenced games is when they start copying whole sequences almost frame-by-frame. They can’t do action scenes but for some reason they want me to sit through their recreation of a famous scene from Goodfellas or something.

JM: Not everybody that wants to make games wants to make them for the same reason. So there’s a certain kind of game like Tetris or Minecraft or whatever that doesn’t need a story. It has nothing to do with it, it’s still a video game, it’s still a fantastic game. But it doesn’t need a narrative in any sense. And then there’s another kind of game where it takes place in a setting, and you have other characters. And as long as you have those two components you have to have a story.

But the story may not be the reason why these people are making the game, it may be because they want to do this other thing where they love this cover mechanic or it’s about getting a kill streak or it’s about some other thing. Some other signal, substance, payload that they enjoy. And then the other things are just the kind of things that you have to have to give everything a context but nobody’s passionate about it. Nobody lives and breathes that aspect of the game.

Wolfenstein: The New Order – evil Nazi robots

GC: But when you say that I think of something like Bayonetta. It’s my one of my favourite games and the creator obviously feels the story elements are important – but they’re awful and they go on forever. I just think, ‘You’ve made one of the best arcade games ever, why are you making me sit through these terrible cut scenes?’

JM: [laughs]

GC: I can’t help thinking it’d be better to have no story than a bad one, especially one that takes up so much time.

JM: [laughs] I haven’t played it. So what you’re saying is here’s someone who cared and they failed.

GC: Yeah, someone that clearly thought it should have a story element but wasn’t very good at making it. Would you have advised taking it out or getting someone else in to do it?

JM: Your responsibility as a developer is just getting it as a good as it can be. It all depends on the game, but if you want to have a union of gameplay and storyline it has to be created together. And I know many people don’t do it like that: hire a Hollywood writer, write something good, and we’ll trying to make a game around it. But it doesn’t connect, because really it’s very, very small things that are going to carry it. There’s a level of experience that you can only reach if you plan that way from the beginning.

The underlying problem is that when you start making a game the distance from that to having something playable and fun is so incredibly long, and so you’re aching to get going and there’s so much temptation to say, ‘Ah **** it, we’ll solve that later!’ But that’s what pre-production is, it’s all of the stakeholders getting together and they’re arguing over what they want to do. And then you have this lengthy, lengthy thing of trying to reach agreement and moving on. And that in itself is a skill, and it’s a very important skill to have as a developer because if you can’t reach those agreements you can’t progress.

So unless you’ve made those agreements early on you’re gonna have to make them at some point, but the longer you wait the less prepared the game’s gonna be for whatever you come up with. So it could be as simple as that. If you focus on only the gameplay mechanics now, and once they are done and someone has made all the levels and so on and then you decide on the story it doesn’t connect, it doesn’t fit. Because it wasn’t thought of from the beginning.

I’ve heard scientists say this before, where they say that it used to be that you could at least know everything in your field. But now there’s so much data out there, there’s so much knowledge, that even the best of the best doesn’t know everything in their field any more. And that’s exactly what video games are. They’re so big and they’re so complicated to deal with that not one person can control everything.

So it’s also about that, it’s about being able to distribute that work between everyone and making sure that even though you don’t control a particular area you know what’s going on there and you trust the person that’s responsible for it. And if something comes up that affects the things I’m doing you trust that they will let me know, and we’ll negotiate and we’ll move on. But as long as you don’t have that something’s going to have to give, you know?

[The PR guy has reappeared for a final time and this time can’t be shooed away]